author|Xie Minghong
editor|Li Chunhui
challenge the one-month breakfast not to be repeated! To prove the abundance of breakfast in the city, you can often see similar check-in activities in short videos. But there are only so few regional famous snacks, and sometimes they are quite anxious for bloggers' "next meal".
If you expand the scope of materials to the whole country, people in Beijing drink bean juice, people in Tianjin eat rice noodles, Shaanxi people eat fried dough sticks, Henan people eat spicy soup, Guizhou people eat rice noodles, Chongqing people eat small noodles, Guangxi people eat snail noodles... …Not to mention one month, even one hundred days is more than enough.
No, the third season of "Breakfast China", which is one step ahead on the way to clock in, is closer to the goal of completing the "Hundred Episodes of Food Documentary" and shooting 100 kinds of Chinese breakfast after its airing on October 19th. The breadth and depth of Chinese breakfast culture puts forward higher requirements on the audiovisual language and media communication of gourmet documentaries. "Breakfast China" has explored a set of effective methodology in the attempt of a hundred episodes of content.
Its single episode length is controlled within 10 minutes, which adapts to the instantaneous and fragmented dissemination requirements of the Internet; the micro narrative with gourmet restaurants as the protagonist, gets rid of the burden of the grand narrative of traditional food documentaries; novel audio-visual style and The clock-in fashion has led to the younger generation of audience positioning.
In the field of "micro documentary", Tencent Video’s "Breakfast China" is undoubtedly the most extreme exploration. Its narrative structure, communication method, and audience positioning have broken the shackles of traditional documentaries. Only differentiated content advantages can survive. This is the "Darwinism" of the food documentary track where the weak can eat.
documentary iteration: from elite culture to civilian perspective
What is a macro narrative? When Qianlong went to Jiangnan, he said that this dish was delicious. What is micro-narrative? Probably the little nephew of the neighbor's uncle Qiu said it was delicious. Before the food documentary network biochemical, most of them chose macro narratives and became the habitat of elite culture.
is represented by "China on the Bite of the Tongue", and most of the macro-narrative documentaries take the countryside as the geographic space and the touch of homesickness as the emotional background. This lens language is similar to Flahadi's romantic thinking of "distant past and distant regions", and it is also a continuation of the documentary "Deep Mountain Old Forest School" in the 1990s.
The rural landscape has become the spiritual look back on the disappearing "agricultural civilization" of the elite culture. "From a grassroots perspective, Chinese society is rural, a ritual society that was born and died in Sri Lanka." According to Mr. Fei Xiaotong's saying, it is not difficult to understand the hometown feelings and elites expressed in these food documentaries. Perspective.
And when we shift our perspective to documentary films such as "Breakfast China", " Supper Jianghu ", "Boiling Bar Hot Pot", we will find that there are other "one shop, one stall, one street" between towns. A "civilian space". They don't care about the poetic dwelling, but they live out the most real smoke.
The endless stream of diners, the boss’s single cycle, and the silhouettes of market life complete the life return of the gourmet documentary. The store of "Joy in Suffering" shows another optimistic and tenacious spiritual background. Taking the single loop at the end of "Breakfast China" as an example, the audience can quickly get the personality and attitude of the bosses from the song.
Liu Shuang, who makes beef tendon noodles, sang "The World's First Class" on the riverside to express his pride; Yang Changzhi, who experienced the Wenchuan earthquake, expressed his comfort to the happiness of family with "I Want to Have a Home"; Yin Xinan is a neighborhood The neighborhood sticks to the bean juice shop, and "Friends Don't Cry" is his warmest love for humans.
The first-person narrative tone of the small shop owner reduces the sense of alienation in information dissemination and gives the documentary a stronger emotional rendering power. The mutual support of Li Chunsheng and his wife who make pig soup, the way of getting along with the three sisters of Long Lamei who make small cakes, and the fun conversation between Hu Liping who makes slag meat steamed rice and his son. From the love between husband and wife to sisters, it is not ordinary And moving scene.
"What is the function of documentary" has always been an important disagreement in the creative field. Documentaries believe that documentaries are a place of survival, but Grierson believes that documentaries should be like a "hammer" as a tool to transform society.
"Breakfast China", which organically integrates the onlooker (mirror) and intervention (hammer), has won the common peopleVictory of transformation.
"Food for a Day", a food hero's biography
"Historical Records · Biographies of Goods": "Selling pulp is a small business, and Zhang's tens of millions." The small business of selling beverages, but Zhang's family business is flourishing. It can be seen that it is a store that has won the code to get rich. Nowadays, it seems that every city has its own gourmet legend. Their different personalities and ups and downs of life stories add special appeal to the food.
Tencent Video Documentary's self-made brand new food documentary IP "Food for a Day" also casts its perspective on group portraits of food characters. "Food for a Day" uses "Eat a Good Meal, a Good Day" as the Slogan, which is composed of "Breakfast China" and "Let's Go!" Seafood", "Toward the Supper" and "Boiling Bar Hot Pot" form the first content matrix. Through the content with clear timeliness and sense of scene, portraits of gourmet people of different regions, ages, occupations and appearances are portrayed. From food stories to human stories, the most important thing to ignore is their emotional expression under the camera.
"Breakfast China" is a meeting of the bosses and diners, starting all kinds of lives with breakfast.
Gu Yunqing, who makes crab buns, doesn’t want to be angry, and insists on staying together as a family is the most important thing; Shi Jie, who makes rice noodles, has contrasting personalities, his brother is slow and his sister is quick-tempered, and his sister is mistaken for his sister and will be angry; Xia Yabao reads books and learns to cook without a teacher, proudly said: "I can't find the master, hehe!"
"Supper Jianghu" is the mutual comfort between the owner and the night returnees, no matter how late there is food, there will always be food and food.
Huo Yuanjia’s barbecue mother-in-law from Wuhan, and her guests are intertwined with the guests, and they are more afflicted with each other, composing the night market concerto; the uncle of Xiamen Yousheng Snacks, doing business during the day when he was young, and having fun at night; Nanning Zhongshan Road "night market mayor "Uncle Jiu, maintain the business environment of the night market with a strict management style.
"Boiling Hot Pot" focuses on the people around the pot with fierce enthusiasm, and the world is full of joy and sorrow.
Yunnan’s Zi Kaixun prepared sweet chicken fir hot pot for his mother to celebrate the hard-won gathering; Laoliao’s Suantang Fish Restaurant in Guizhou is the base of his cycling team, and friends from all over the world surrounded Suantang Hotpot Happy life; Wei Xiukun from the northeast never intends to replace the iron pot that has boiled sauerkraut and white meat for 20 years, burning a new fire at the bottom of the stove every day.
"Go!" "Seafood" will also meet with the audience next year. From home-cooked dishes to seafood banquets, the story born with the sea must be different.
In addition to the intensive attention paid to the producers of the food, the feedback from the diners is also a distinctive feature of the "Food for a Day" IP. The down-to-earth creative style, whether it is the interviews and records of ordinary people during the filming process, or the barrage exchanges in the later period, is an innovation based on the audience.
The diners who eat Yunnan wild mushrooms in "Boiling Hot Pot" teased: "If you have any questions, go directly to the Second Affiliated Yard for an injection." The high school classmate who drank pig soup in the first season of "Breakfast China" was teased by the director. Confess to the other party. Singles in front of the camera borrow food language generously to marry "(hope object) like this bowl of pig soup, both inside and outside."
This documentary with the face of the characters as the structure may become a new trend in future creation: focusing on micro-narrative and civilian perspectives, reflecting the smallest changes in social development.
three-dimensional content matrix, full coverage of time and scenes
Wu Zonghu wrote in "Old Beijing’s Porridge Shop and Fried Goods House": “Since Tongzhi and Guangxu, Beijing’s Zaodaianpu has been divided into two roads. One is the congee shop and the other They are fried food houses, and they all have their own set of business methods." Folk food began a meticulous division of labor early, but the vertical classification of food documentaries was much later.
From the general national cuisine, to the regional, spatial, and temporal classification of cuisines, the audience's eyeballs are not tired of being detailed, the more they look at it, the more subtle. The ingenuity of the "Food for a Day" series of food documentaries uses scene sense, timeliness and storyliness as cuts to portray portraits of food characters in different life scenes, conveying the human touch in the "bowl of fireworks on earth".
"Breakfast China" and "Toward the Supper" are typical "time-oriented". Breakfast and supper correspond to different time dimensions and different living conditions at different times. The "food for a day" starts with breakfast. Diners use the first meal in the morning to get the energy to start the day, while supper is the comfort of enjoying food unrestrainedly after entering private time.At the end of the day, waiting for the restart of the next "Food for a Day". Through this linear coverage of time, "Food for a Day" also meets the different needs of visitors.
"Go!" Seafood" and "Boiling Bar Hot Pot" are obvious "vertical cuisines" with distinct types and stable scenes. "Go!" "Seafood" uses seafood as a guide, covering the four seas of China geographically, and records 30+ kinds of marine life and eating methods; "Boiling Bar Hot Pot" crosses the scale of cities, and realizes the hot pot journey from first-tier cities to rural fields .
Yunnan's wild mushroom hot pot, Cantonese style seafood grill, Beijing brushed lamb hot pot, these categorized foods seem to be placed under the name of the city, but they do not only show the subordinate relationship between food and the city, but a kind of space Symbolic expression. Each special dish is the best signifier of each city, town and country.
In addition to time and space, "Food for a Day" IP also has a hidden dimension-the sense of companionship brought by food culture and identity expression. In the social relationship of documentary films such as "Breakfast China", the core is the boss and the customer. The social relationship between the two supporting each other and snuggling for warmth is inseparable from the expression of the identity of the working group.
From " Flavor World ", Tencent Video has started the "flavor" IP layout based on "flavor world", "flavor laboratory" and "flavor origin", establishing a distinct gourmet content matrix. The newly launched IP "Food for a Day" is an integrated operation and conceptual upgrade of the vertical food documentary.
Under the content matrix of "Food for a Day", the form of micro-recording caters to the acceptance habits and aesthetic styles of young users, and the full-scene coverage highlights the quality and specialization of documentaries. Distinctive IP label, emotional value extension, and long-term content life cycle may incubate more diversified commercial advantages for this series of full-bodied documentaries.
Especially in the current period of rapid improvement of the documentary industry chain, Tencent Video’s matrix operation based on IP may be an effective attempt for gourmet documentaries to mature industrialization. Meals pay attention to set meals, and all types of content have a trend of aggregation. Tencent Video, which has played a "combination punch", has undoubtedly opened up the engine of industry innovation.
